Depending on the local landscape of your neighborhood, you may have plenty of flat space to work with, or as in the case of the projects below, the space available to improve your yard poses some type of challenge. Whether you have a hill right off the back door or need to work inside an established footprint, there's a solution to any challenge.
Read MoreTopics: Outdoor Living, Design Trends and Ideas
Outdoor living extends the function of our home's property by providing useful areas to hang out, grill out, and chill out, outside of the house. While some homes come with great outdoor areas already in place when you move in, often time these lawns, porches and patios don't account for the specific ways you and your family want to interact with the outside. In the six examples below, we've highlighted before and afters that show what a bit of personalization can do to improve the usefulness and quality of your home's outdoor living areas.
Read MoreTopics: Outdoor Living, Design Trends and Ideas
In a previous fireplace design blog post, we reported that outdoor fireplaces and firepits were in hot demand in Greater Cincinnati, and we can state now that this shows no signs of stopping. Having a fire element in your home's outdoor spaces allows you to extend to their use earlier in the spring and further into the summer (and depending on the type of winter we're having, even during the holidays). Whether you opt for a wood-burning or natural gas option will largely depend on how you wish to use it (and whether obtaining and storing wood is a possibility for you), but either of these choices can be designed in such a way to fit the character of your landscape and the needs surrounding it.
Read MoreTopics: Outdoor Living, Design Trends and Ideas, Fireplaces
Faced with an expansive backyard with no character and a rolling slope, the homeowners had a very simple objective: make the yard a party space. Beyond this clear objective, the homeowners had a wish list of key elements, including a pool, an outdoor living room, and lots of comfortable space for a crowd. The result is a space that takes full advantage of the back yard while keeping scale, space and views at the forefront of the design. The resulting transformation is a 2016 NARI Contractor of the Year Residential Exterior Winner.
Read MoreTopics: Outdoor Living, Project Spotlight
